Thursday, December 20, 2012

The Economist has a comment on a recent paper by economist Martin Weitzman who speculates about the prospects for geoengineering (focussing only on aerosol injection). Starting from a common distinction made in economics, between public goods and their externalities, he states that we face two different problems with regard to climate change. The first is the interest of everyone (read: nation states) to avoid dangerous warming but not to bear the costs. This is known as the free rider problem.

Friday, December 14, 2012

In Germany, an interesting shift in climate research can be noticed. On spiegel-online, the journalist Alex Bojanowski picked up a recent trend and interviewed several researchers, mostly from the field of cultural and social sciences about the future of climate negotiations after Doha. In his article "Rethinking global warming: Experts call for end to climate mega summits", he states:

Top climate researchers have had enough, though. Several leading experts
at internationally renowned institutes in Germany are demanding an end
to the climate summit charade. It is time to begin confronting the
reality of a warmer future rather than meekly insisting that global
warming can be slowed without taking action to make that happen, they
say.

Yesterday Alec Rawls, a self-described climate sceptic and IPCC reviewer, has put a draft of the next IPCC report on the web. The website went down immediately down under overload. Commentators and twitterati are divided: some see it as a fullfilment of the demand for more transparency, others are up in arms about the unethical breach of the terms of confidentiality (each IPCC reviewer has to sign up to a secrecy clause when registering, see the experience of one of my colleagues at my university for an inside view).

Andy Revkin has spoken out in favour of the leaking and posted new links to alternative servers. So if you want to read the draft, I suggest you follow these.
Revkin has something very interesting to say about the changing climate of these pre-release leaks:

It’s important, before anyone attacks Rawls for posting the drafts (this is distinct from his views on their contents), to consider that panel report drafts at various stages of preparation have been leaked in the past by people with entirely different points of view.
That was the case in 2000, when I was leaked a final draft of the summary for policy makers of the second science report from the panel ahead of that year’s round of climate treaty negotiations. As I explained in the resulting news story, “A copy of the summary was obtained by The New York Times from someone who was eager to have the findings disseminated before the meetings in The Hague.”

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Germany's energy transition (Energiewende) supposedly serves as a role model for other countries. There are high hopes that Germany's know how in renewable energy will lead to a competitive advantage on future energy markets. This may be the case but so far the story is not off to a good start. In order to plug the gap left by decommissioning nuclear plants and to even out intermittent wind and solar energy, utility companies find it most profitable to use coal power. The economics of the energy markets is unambiguous, as this Bloomberg analysis shows.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Andrew Hoffman has an excellent article on the issue polarization observed by many in the climate change debate. He distinguishes between 'convinced' and 'skeptical' logics which are represented by various actors, organizations, and social movements. Both sides demonize each other, exhibiting deeply held, but opposing values. His data comes from two sources, interviews and participant observation at the Heartland Institute conference in 2010, and an analysis of over 800 U.S. newspaper editorials and letters to the editor from September 2007 to September 2009.

I recently received the following link: https://vimeo.com/53979295. It is a rather frightening story produced by Scientia Productions that claims "Scientia Productions is a small independent production company specializing in high quality documentaries dedicated to authentic educational television, documentary production and innovative educational websites. We feature the research of many of the world's best academics and scholars presented in multiple formats from web-based video to 1080p High Definition Television. Our staff consists of academics that specialize in New Media Applications, specifically HD video and web-based communication. The company is committed to the principles of academic freedom, quality educational experiences, 'qualified' research and conveying that research to society. Scientia evolved to fill a niche communicating academic research results for applications in society, including formal and informal education and policy development and planning for sustainable futures."

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Anne Karpf has an interesting piece in the Guardian in which she describes her 'tuning out' from the climate change discourse, especially from its ubiquitous exhortations. She thinks she might be something worse than a climate change sceptic: a climate change ignorer. This seems to capture a common spirit of being concerned about global warming but unable to engage with the issue in any meaningful, permanent way.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Thursday, November 22, 2012

As the negotiations are getting underway for COP 18 in Doha, commentators have started making their noises. Usual noises, following a well-known, worn-out script. Fiona Harvey in the Guardian writes under the headline

The gap between the carbon emission cuts pledged and the cuts scientists say are needed has widened, report warns
quoting 'warnings' from those in the business who know. Warnings about the gap between what needs to be done in terms of GHG reductions and actual achievements. UNEP director Steiner and UN

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Stephen Turner, a professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida has published a thought provoking article in Minerva. The title "normal accidents" in the title of his paper refers to a concept developed by organisational sociologist Charles Perrow who wrote a book with the same title in which he claimed that some technologies inevitably produce accidents. This is the case when systems are complex and tightly coupled (see above for the 2x2 matrix which shows the four combinations). Perrow's examples are technological disasters which happened in chemical or nuclear plants. If something goes wrong in one part of the system the fault will propagate through the whole system and lead to unpredictable, sometimes catastrophic consequences. Lose coupling would prevent the spreading of such failures, they are more forgiving.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Last night BBC radio 4 had an half hour feature which you can listen to here. There is a selection of statements from the likes of Michael Mann, Steve McIntyre, Andrew Montford, Bob Ward, Fiona Harvey, Mike Hulme, among others. Interesting is the opinion voiced by some that there was a period of openness in the climate science community following in the months after Climategate, but that this period is over--it has given way to a retrenchment. However, published research in the climate sciences emphasizes uncertainties more than before, as Mike Hulme observes. Finally, the detective superintendent police officer investigating the case concludes that we do not know if the data was hacked or leaked. In a few weeks the legal powers to prosecute will cease so maybe the real email hacker/leaker will step forward.

Scientific American has put up a detailed explanation of why hurricane Sandy may be linked to anthropogenic
climate change: a chain of events that, critically, involves the
North Atlantic Oscillation nudged towards a negative state by the
melting of Arctic sea-ice. On the other hand, realclimate explained
in 2007 that climate change was threatening the Mediterranean
region with more severe droughts because climate change would nudge
the North Atlantic Oscillation towards a positive state. The
IPCC model suite of 2007 would show these trends very clearly.

This seems harder to understand than
the wave-particle dualism, but the explanation is easy: both arguments are realizations of a certain sort of climate noise.

Monday, October 29, 2012

The recent jail sentence handed out to Italian seismologists has provoked angry reactions from across a spectrum of commentators. Some of these seem to have been written in the heat of the moment. In good academic tradition it is perhaps better to analyse the issues at play, as dispassionately as possible. I have drafted a paper in which I try to provide an account of decision making under uncertainty in which scientific expertise has been used in a specific way by public authorities.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

It is not the failure of the regulations that is the problem but their
basic design. They have caused people to focus on the most expensive
ways of mitigating climate change, rather than the cheapest, imposing
high costs for little gain. Moreover, by concentrating on their own
carbon production, and how to reduce it, Europeans have ignored the
impact of their continued demand for goods made using carbon- intensive
processes. Since Chinese and Indian manufacturing is usually dirtier
than Europe’s, the real upshot of Europe’s choices has been an increase
in global emissions. The regulatory approach, argues Mr Helm, has got
the worst of all worlds. It is expensive, it has not cut emissions and
its treaties are unworkable. No wonder the public is growing sceptical.

Friday, October 26, 2012

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian sees some merit in the Aquila court decision (see here for an excellent comment). While he does not go as far as justifying the jail sentences for the six scientific experts who "failed to predict" the earthquake in Italy, he thinks they should be held to account, just like other professionals:

Last week the English paper Mail on Sunday had a story claiming that a Met Office report shows global warming had stopped 16 years ago. The article, written by David Rose, caused a storm and was contested in a piece Dana Nuccitelli had written for Skeptical Science and published by the Guardian. It is certainly no accident that these two papers aligned themselves in predictable ways. And it is no accident that corresponding blogs reacted in predictable ways.

What is the fuss about? The Mail article shows temperature data from 1997 to 2012 with no warming trend.

Friday, October 12, 2012

There is a new paper out under this title by Indur Goklany, to be published in WIRES Climate Change.

Here is the abstract:
This paper challenges claims that global warming outranks other threats facing humanity through the foreseeable future (assumed to be 2085–2100). World Health Organization and British government‐sponsored global impact studies indicate that, relative to other factors, global warming's impact on key determinants of human and environmental well‐being should be small through 2085 even under the warmest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Our friend Reinhard Böhm has died, unexpectedly but at least on his beloved Sonnenblick. Wonderful critical observer not only of climate but also of the social process "climate science". His book "Heisse Luft" was an inspiring (and well written) read. (Is the song "Komm lieber Mai und mache die Bäume wieder grün" of Mozart indicative that it is now warmer than in Mozart's times? - No ... read Reinhard.)
Spiegel on-line has more on this sad news.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Regular readers of this blog will remember that we had quite a few discussions about the alleged (or real) alarmism over climate change. The UK (among other countries) seemed to be a case in point. Now the EU climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, is on record of saying pretty much the same (or at least some unnamed source close to her -- you see, it is a sensitive issue).

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Dieter Helm, the Oxford economist and climate change expert, has a new book out. It is calledThe Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong – and How to Fix it. He has written a blog which summarizes the main points here. He argues that the coming years will see an increase in carbon emissions, primarily through additional energy generation with coal power plants. Emerging economies will be using this form of energy supply because it is cheap. It is also dirty, in fact the dirtiest form of energy. China and India are currently opening 3 coal power stations a week.

Monday, October 1, 2012

An interesting report is out, co-authored by Emily Shuckburgh, Rosie Robison and Nick Pidgeon. It examines the public perception of climate science and climate scientists in the UK, comparing data collected in six focus group interviews. There are some results which will not surprise Klimazwiebel regulars, others might. Below I summarize the main findings:

Remember the headlines that we have 10-15 years to save the planet? Six years ago Tony Blair warned that the world will reach "catastrophic tipping points" on climate change "within 15 years, unless serious action is taken to tackle global warming." The Guardian from 2006 quoted him saying "We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points." This rhetoric was deployed in the run up to the climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009. After its failure it seemed to have been forgotten, almost an embarrassment. Mainstream politicians, keen to use the rhetoric before 2009, seemed to have ditched it afterwards.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Imagine an alien from Mars asking you: what is the fuzz about climate change all about? You don't need the help of a noble prize winner to explain; a good journalist will do the job and give our extraterrestrial friend an insight into the mess we are in. The climate mess is in fact an everyday story, like this one about artificial snow in an American ski resort:

"This coming ski season", the New York Times reports, "the resort, Arizona Snowbowl, will become the first ski resort in the world to use 100% sewage effluent to make artificial snow". The reason for this is climate change: Snowmaking is necessary to remain competitive, to guarantee the resort is open on Thanksgiving or Christmas latest, and to have a consistent ski season.

For many years now, 13 American Indian tribes and environmental groups are fighting against "the ski resort's expansion plans in the San Franciscan peaks that include clear-cutting of 74 acres of forest and piping treated sewage effluent onto a mountain to make snow." The protesters "consider the mountain sacred and view the wastewater snow a desecration". Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity, says: "It's a disaster, environmentally and culturally".

Thursday, September 27, 2012

It's time for another poem on klimazwiebel, your favorite climate-poetry blog. Science is about finding out how climate works, how it functions. Philosophy tries to give it a meaning and to make sense of it (?). And finally arts and poetry try to figure out how it feels.

Half a century later, for the poet Michael Robbins (educated by Guns N Roses, hip-hop and the University of Chicago), Braeutigan's vision definitively has turned into a technological nightmare. He seems to live in a world with unclear boundaries between video games and reality, a kind of i-nightmare, and in his poem he struggles with issues like hybrid creatures, terror, and his carbon footprint which has turned him into a "Yeti for the Sherpas". Machines of loving grace? Well, not exactly - anger has raised his "appetite for destruction":

From an article in the New Scientist by Fred Pearce, written in Sept 2009:One of the world’s top climate modellers said Thursday we could
be about to enter one or even two decades during which temperatures
cool. “I am not one of the sceptics,” insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. “However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.”

As usually, Judith Curry sums up the discussions surrounding this statement, pre- and post- Climategate, and provides some interesting links. But her main focus is on the term nasty. She writes:

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

There are some disturbing news regarding the IPCC. As Roger Pielke Jr. reports on his blog, there is a strange tendency in the IPCC to exaggerate observed disaster losses due to climate change. He lists several examples where he had made suggestions to the IPCC of how to alter the official narrative, in order to avoid such exaggerations. The reply by the IPCC is sobering: it does not even seem to acknowledge the charges made by Pielke. This begs the question if they took him seriously in the first place. It seems not. As I remarked in a comment on his blog, this looks very much like arrogance of power or bureaucratic mentality (maybe both?). One is led to believe that the IPCC reckons no one will read the issues in any detail. Perhaps they are right in this respect and Roger is wrong in his honest belief that "Nothing below [in his account of the saga] is complicated or nuanced." How long will it take until this is exposed to a wider audience?

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

This interview with the Japanese scientist Toshio Yamagata was prepared by Hans von Storch in July 2012. The original has been published in the August 2012 issue of the Newsletter of the Atmospheric Science Section of the AGU.

Toshio Yamagata is currently the director of Application Laboratory at Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. He was the Dean of School of Science of the University of Tokyo from 2009 to 2012 and after retiring from the university in 2012, he was given the title of Professor Emeritus. His has done extensive modeling and analysis work with focus on large-scale dynamical processes of the oceans and the atmosphere. He has been awarded in 2004 the American Meteorological Society’s H. U. Sverdrup Gold Medal “for his outstanding accomplishments in the study of ocean and climate dynamics, especially with respect to El Nino and air-sea interaction over the Indian Ocean.” He is a fellow of the AMS and AGU for his accomplishments and outstanding contributions to the atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

Monday, September 10, 2012

It is about time Klimazwiebel readers get up to speed with the latest development on Nicolas Stern's famous report, commissioned by the UK Chancellor five years ago. In it, Stern famously called climate change the biggest market failure in history, suggesting carbon pricing (and carbon markets) as remedy. This report has been used as authoritative source in many quarters, above all by people endorsing stringent climate mitigation policies. It informed attempts to justify drastic and costly emission cuts, a strategy which seems to lose momentum. A firm focus on economic growth has become more important and citizen opposition to many renewable projects have stalled ambitious plans.

Monday, August 20, 2012

Felix Mormann has published a thoughtful analysis of the renewables revolution and the challenges that come with it. You can download the full paper here. What I find remarkable is the wide range of factors considered. He does not offer a single panacea ("leave it to industry!", "leave it to the market!" "Impose high carbon prices!" etc) but discusses the regulatory framework, market incentives, innovation, R&DD, civil society responses, and technical requirements of electricity generation and transmission. He obviously knows the German and US landscape well, so has some very informed views on offer for a comparative perspective.
He obviously does not know the Hartwell approach and so fails to connect some obvious dots (e.g. between technology R&DD and regulation/taxation). He also puts much hope in the 2 degrees rhetoric and other mainstream views (like Lord Stern's). So given his starting point his paper is a rather refreshing take on climate policy.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

When I am sitting in my room in an autumn evening reading the Klimazwiebel and decide to switch on the heating, will the heating will have any effect whatsoever on the room temperature ? After a little thought, I conclude: 'no, since temperatures the yesterday at midday were higher than as the temperature measured after switching on the heating. Thus the observed temperature rise in the room could have had natural causes'.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

In the last
thread, a discussion evolved about the roles of science and technology in
policy advising. One position, which was brought forward, was to leave after
problem definition the advisory capacity to technology, in particular research
& development done by industry.

The examples
discussed were mainly from energy supply, and were dealing with global markets,
such as photovoltaics. A reasonable arrangement, which was put forward, was to ask
science to define the problem, let policymaking decide if it was really problem
and which attributes a “solution” would need to have. After this it would be
mainly a matter of technology and competition on the market.

My contribution about policy advise in the context of coastal defense was unfortunately and accidentally deleted. Unfortunately I have no copy of the text, so that I can not easily reconstruct it. On the other hand, the interest measured in terms of comments and clicks was rather limited so that it may not be worth the effort.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

It is long known that in cities there may be a significant climatic effect due to urbanization - thus in cities we have the interesting and challenging task of determining at least three significant drivers for change, if not more, namely the effect of the local modification of the environment as well as the local manifestation of global change due to greenhouse gases (plus, possibly other global factors). Unfortunately, systematic studies about the determination and separation of these effects - in principle a detection and attribution task - have not been done often. At least, I am not aware of such efforts; indeed even studies only on the size and distribution of the urban heat island effect (UHI) are not done often; in Hamburg, a first study was only published in the last few years - before that one could hear that in a maritime climatic environment as Hamburg, the effect would be negligible. It is not.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Fundamental ideologies, beliefs, values, artifacts (technology / tool / literature and poems)), values, assumptions are the things that make up culture. (I am sure I have missed a few but you get the idea.). In our cultural analysis of climate change many of these have been catalogued in one way or another, in one region or another, at one time or another, with one group of people or another. We have learned ‘how people feel about nature’ or ‘how people feel about climate change’ and I have also been made aware of some nice poems. Now, knowledge for knowledge’s sake is a nice luxury but climate change is, we are told, about real danger in need of real pragmatic action, although many ideals are often floated.

Let’s assume for this exercise that climate change is indeed one of the greatest and most dangerous issues facing life (in all of its aspects, as we know it) on Earth. Then what is the pragmatic contribution of cultural studies? (I admit there is probably a great deal I do not know about cultural studies and would therefore be grateful for any examples.)

The full manuscript is available from academia.edu, the abstract reads:To do climate science sustainably, a number of constraints in practicing research and communicating science need to be implemented. Among them are the admission of uncertainty and the possibility for future revision, the recognition that scientific knowledge is challenged and influenced by cultural constructions, and the usage of accurate language, which is not conflicting with every-day language. That scientific knowledge does not directly lead to political conclusions must also be recognized. A few elements needed for a successful science-public dialogue are listed and discussed.

We are glad to announce a special issue of "Nature and Culture" on "post-normal climate science", edited by Werner Krauss, Mike S. Schäfer and Hans von Storch. It is follow-up to our last year's workshop on "post-normal science: the case of climate research", which was discussed for example here and now gets a wonderful update by Jerry Ravetz, who puts the workshop into the context of the history of post-normal science. During this summer, we will present his and all the other articles here on klimazwiebel for discussion.

Judith Curry already presented Silke Beck's article from this special issue, 'Between tribalism and trust: The IPCC under the "public microscope",' here on Climate etc. This is an excellent piece of social science, which aims to reconstruct a debate in order to show how it came into being and to make it understandable. This is not about truth or not truth, right or wrong: this is about the social dynamics of a public and highly contested debate.

Read here the abstract (main parts of the text and a link to the manuscript you find on the Judith Curry link)

Sometimes, scenarios of possible future climate change are examined if they would represent a "statistically significant" change from present conditions. Usage of this terminology is misleading, and valid only in a very restricted sense - because of the sampling assumptions needed for employing the machinery of statistical hypothesis testing.
This issue is discussed in the paper "Testing ensembles of climate change scenarios for"statistical significance"by Hans von Storch and Francis W. Zwiers, which has been accepted for publication by "Climatic Change".

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

A
recurrent issue in statistical climatology is how to deal with
long-term trends when one is trying to estimate correlations between
two time series. A reader sent us the following question, posed to
him by a friend of his, related to our test of the method applied by
Mann et al to produce the hockey-stick curve in 1998

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

George Monbiot, the influential English journalist and
environmental activist writes
in the Guardian on the failed Rio+20 summit, under the deadline “After Rio,
we know. Governments have given up on the planet”.

It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth's living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit in Rio last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue "sustained growth", the primary cause of the biosphere's losses.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Jay Rosen has given an excellent account on climate change, why it is a wicked problem, and how journalists could cope with its coverage. This was delivered as keynote address to the 2nd UK Conference of Science Journalists, June 25, 2012 at The Royal Society, London.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

I recently submitted a paper that was somewhat against the mainstream climate change conclusions, and needless to say the paper was rejected.It was submitted to a sociological journal which I assumed might be less partisan.But this is not sour grapes about rejection.I have come to view journals like clubs.If you don’t agree with the rules of the club then you don’t get membership.If you can’t find a club to join, start your own and seek like minded souls.But this is not about trends in academia, it is about one single comment made by a reviewer.

A new study published study in Nature alerts to impending catastrophic developments - this time not mainly based on climate change impacts but on wider developments caused by resource use. Here is the abstract:

Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence. The plausibility of a planetary-scale ‘tipping point’ highlights the need to improve biological forecasting by detecting early warning signs of critical transitions on global as well as local scales, and by detecting feedbacks that promote such transitions. It is also necessary to address root causes of how humans are forcing biological changes.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

In my series of interviews with Atmospheric scientists for the newsletter of the Atmospheric Science Section of the American Geophysical Union, I have now interviewed Christopher Castro, who is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona. The interview was published in the May 2012 issue of the Newsletter - it is #15 in my AGU series (there is a second series, among scientists from the Hamburg Center of Excellence CLISAP).

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Oliver Krüger and Frederik Schenk: The Long Run

1 Introduction

Just recently, klimazwiebel released an interview with Reiner Grundmann , in which he reports about his struggles with publishing a somewhat controversial paper. The story we are about to tell and the previous interview fit neatly together.

2 The Story

Half a year ago, we planned to write a comment to Donat et al. (2011) in the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). Because GRL changed its policies regarding comments to already published manuscripts, we prepared a small paper. In the following peer review process we realized that getting published would eventually become difficult. We received two rounds of reviews with GRL, which finally rejected our manuscript.

Later on we revised the manuscript and submitted to the Environmental Research Letters (ERL), where the manuscript was rejected after one round of reviews. After that incidence, we submitted to one open discussion journal, namely Climate of the Past (CP). CP rejected the manuscript immediately at the initial review stage. The initial review, done by one of the editors, is supposed to be a low standard to enter the open discussion, but we failed nevertheless.

In total we received seven reviews that lead to the rejection in three journals in a row. These seven reviews varied in their opinions significantly. They varied from minor comments to major comments. They were either positively or negatively minded. We also received "interesting" comments. For instance, one reviewer suggested that the average of +1 and -1 is 0.

The editor who did the initial review for CP was more open to questions regarding his rejection. He stated that our results would be plausible, but not convincing (even though he believed our results).

After these episodes, we decided to change our publication strategy. We put the manuscript on arXiv.org to make it publicly available. At the same, we submitted to Journal of Climate, from which we are expecting news whether they are willing to start the review process or not.

3 The Manuscript

The manuscript we are talking about is called "Inconsistencies between long-term trends in storminess derived from the 20CR reanalysis and observations" by Krueger, Schenk, Feser, and Weisse.

In the letter to
the editor we wrote: “In the manuscript we analyze storminess derived through a
pressure-based proxy (extreme percentiles of geostrophic wind speed) in the 20th
Century Reanalysis dataset 20CR over the Northeast Atlantic and compare our
findings with results obtained from pressure observations.”

And continuing: “Our
findings are based on a relatively simple, yet robust method for analyzing
storminess over the large and well studied area of the Northeast Atlantic. The
results point to a marked inconsistency between storminess in the reanalysis
dataset and storminess derived from observations, which casts doubt on the use
of 20CR to describe long term trends, at least in terms of storminess. We
believe that changes in the number of stations assimilated into 20CR are a
plausible explanation for the discrepancies.

The 20th Century
Reanalysis dataset 20CR is a new climate dataset that reaches back to 1871.
Because it is nearly 140 years long, scientists hope to use it for long-term
trend analyses. With our work, we are assessing how realistically 20CR
describes such long-term trends in terms of storminess. We chose to restrict
our analyses to the Northeast Atlantic region as this region has been in the
focus of several studies in the past that deal with storminess. Ideally,
results obtained through 20CR and observations would agree with other, also
because the pressure observations analyzed in those past studies have been very
likely assimilated into 20CR. Unfortunately, as aforementioned, storminess in
20CR and observed storminess differs significantly.”

Despite from being rejected by several journals, we are continuing our struggles, because we believe it is worth to do so. We do not know yet how many approaches it will take us. Even though our manuscript seems quite controversial, we are willing to initiate a discussion about the topic if somebody lets us.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

1. Reiner, you have published the paper “’Climategate’ and The Scientific Ethos” in Science Technology & Human Values. I understand that this article had a long history of submissions and rejections. Would you mind telling us, what happened, and what you think why this happened?

Global sea-level has
risen at a pace of about 1.8 mm/year in the period 1960 to 2003.
Several factors are contributing to this rise: ocean thermal
expansion, glacier melting, and ground water depletion. Which factor
has been the strongest contributor ?

Saturday, May 12, 2012

This one deserves a post of its own: James Hansen's truly apocalyptic vision of current climate; the answer by Martin Hoerling from NOAA, and finally Kerry Emanuel's comment here on Andrew Revkin's dotearth. In my opinion, Kerry Emanuel's statement demonstrates beautifully that both alarmism and its critics have done their job; now it's time to talk seriously.

(Thanks to Reiner, who posted the link to these articles already here).

Thursday, May 10, 2012

During the last week we
have been confronted by two papers published in Nature
and Science
relating changes in the cryosphere and global sea-level. Their
conclusions point to opposite directions and the attention they have
found in the media is quite unbalanced.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Reiner Grundmann has now published two articles on "ClimateGate". The first is

‘‘Climategate’’ and The Scientific Ethos.
It was published on-line on 23 April 2012 in Science Technology Human Values, and the full article is available here. Before acceptance for publication, the article met lots of flak.

The abstract reads:
In late 2009, e-mails from a server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were released that showed some climate scientists in an unfavorable light. Soon this scandal was known as ‘‘Climategate’’ and a highly charged debate started to rage on blogs and in the mass media. Much of the debate has been about the question whether anthropogenic global warming was undermined by the revelations. But ethical issues, too, became part and parcel of the debate. This article aims to contribute to this debate, assessing the e-mail affair in the light of two normative analyses of science, one proposed by Robert Merton (and developed further by some of his followers), the second by a recent suggestion to use the concept of honest brokering in science policy interactions. On the basis of these analyses, different aspects of malpractice will be discussed and possible solutions will be suggested.

The second paper is the "opinion" article in WIRES Climate Change with the title

The abstract reads:The release of emails from a server at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) in November 2009 and the following climategate controversy have become a topic for interpretation in the social sciences. This article picks out some of the most visible social science comments on the affair for discussion. These comments are compared to an account of what can be seen as problematic practices by climate scientists. There is general agreement in these comments that climate science needs more openness and transparency. But when evaluating climategate a variety of responses is seen, ranging from the apologetic to the highly critical, even condemning the practices in question. It is argued that reluctance to critically examine the climategate affair, including suspect practices of scientists, has to do with the nature of the debate which is highly politicized. A call is made for more reflection on this case which should not be closed off because of political expediency.

Sustainable use of KLIMAZWIEBEL

The participants of KLIMAZWIEBEL are made of a diverse group of people interested in the climate issue; among them people, who consider the man-made climate change explanation as true, and others, who consider this explanation false. We have scientists and lay people; natural scientists and social scientists. People with different cultural and professional backgrounds. This is a unique resource for a relevant and inspiring discussion. This resource needs sustainable management by everybody. Therefore we ask to pay attention to these rules:

1. We do not want to see insults, ad hominem comments, lengthy tirades, ongoing repetitions, forms of disrespect to opponents. Also lengthy presentation of amateur-theories are not welcomed. When violating these rules, postings will be deleted.2. Please limit your contributions to the issues of the different threads.3. Please give your name or use an alias - comments from "anonymous" should be avoided.4. When you feel yourself provoked, please restrain from ranting; instead try to delay your response for a couple of hours, when your anger has evaporated somewhat.5. If you wan to submit a posting (begin a new thread), send it to either Eduardo Zorita or Hans von Storch - we publish it within short time. But please, only articles related to climate science and climate policy.6. Use whatever language you want. But maybe not a language which is rarely understood in Hamburg.